The SGS's Director, Professor Graham Crow, was featured in the Summer 2013's issue of Network (from the British Sociological Association) in its Desert Island Discourse article. Here are extracts on three out of five of Professor Crow's book choices should he get stuck on a desert island...
The Trumpet Shall Sound - Peter Worsley
It is a wonderful demonstration of how the world is open to apparently bizarre interpretations which make more sense as we learn more about them. It also illustrates how doctoral research has been the point of departure for many significant books in sociology. Two of Louise Ryan’s recent Desert Island Discourse choices came out of PhD theses: Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and Ann Oakley’s Housewife. Longer ago, so did Emile Durkheim’s The Division of Labour in Society.
In my new job as Director of the Scottish Graduate School of Social Science I like to emphasise to research students that a good thesis can be the start of a celebrated career. This was true for Goffman, who was associated as a PhD student with my new department at Edinburgh when he was doing fieldwork in the Shetland Islands. At about the same time Worsley was undertaking his PhD fieldwork on Groote Eylandt in northern Australia and noting things about social organisation that were relevant to themes expanded upon in The Trumpet Shall Sound. He later became President of the BSA and Head of the University of Manchester’s pathbreaking Sociology Department. His best-selling Introducing Sociology only just fitted into my school blazer pocket, but I carried it round with me until I had read it through to the end. Having been captivated by that book, I moved on to Worsley’s own research, reported on in his first book it its account of ‘cargo cults’ and the (to Western eyes) strange rationality of people encountering modernity who imagined that it was just a matter of time before their boat arrived, in the same way that they saw boats coming in to sustain the lives of colonial figures on their Melanesian islands.
Decades later Worsley returned to these themes of ‘what different peoples make of the world’ in his 1997 book Knowledges in which he re-empahsised the point that we do well to employ a comparative perspective to understand ourselves and our assumptions about what we know or what we think we know.
Divisions of Labour - Ray Pahl
Appropriately for this feature, my second book also has an island focus. Ray Pahl’s work was published in 1984 about the people of the Isle of Sheppey in Kent (my home county). I had just started as a lecturer at Southampton and was teaching the sociology of community. This was just the book that was needed to update a field that had become over-reliant on classic studies and seemed to have little new to say. It embodied Pahl’s penchant for pursuing new ideas. Pahl had a knack of asking good sociological questions, in this case about what ‘work’ means and who gets to do it, and he was prepared to experiment with new combinations of methods that included surveys, ethnography, essay-writing, photography, oral history and documentary analysis. (He was, it should be noted, helped by a large team in doing this over the period of a decade).
He also had the foresight to place the extensive (pre-digital) fieldwork materials in the archive at the University of Essex, thus making it an even more compelling case for Dawn Lyon, other colleagues and me to undertake a (partial) re-study of the people of the Isle of Sheppey three decades on, exploring their hopes and resilience in a still-bleak economic environment. It is testament to the perceptiveness of Pahl’s analysis that several of the ideas that came out of his Sheppey study have entered everyday language, albeit without their users necessarily knowing where these ideas sprang from. The distinction he made between people who are work-rich and time-poor and their counterparts who are short of work but have plenty of time on their hands highlights a puzzling contradiction of contemporary socio-economic life. If we ask John Westergaard’s pithy question “Who gets what?” we are led to ideas such as these, which illuminate the irrationalities of current inequalities. We might speculate on the ancestry of Paul’s thinking 20 years previous to his time on Sheppey when was a PhD student at the LSE under Westergaard’s supervision.
The Other Side of Middletown - Luke Eric Lassiter
My next book provides a different lesson in how sociological knowledge develops. The Other Side of Middletown, by Luke Eric Lassiter and his colleagues, students and community partners, was published a full three-quarters of a century after the original pioneering report on ‘Middletown’ by Robert and Helen Lynd in which they sought to portray typical small town life in America.
Despite numerous re-studies of ‘Middletown’ (in reality the city of Muncie, Indiana), Lassiter and his team’s book was the first to give due recognition to the town’s previously ignored African-American population. It did so by means of collaboration with research partners who might reasonably have given up on academic researchers as a bad lot. The book also has some wonderful photographs of the people of ‘Middletown’ (taken by one of the students on the project who was studying photography), including one on the front cover of two girls sharing a joke that never fails to bring a smile to my face.
More generally, the book is part of the broad trend towards the democratisation of research. This involves reflecting on the nature of the relationship between researchers and research participants, which has been changing not only in terms of the language used to describe participants (who not so long ago were treated as ‘subjects’) but also, and much more importantly, in terms of the way in which the whole research enterprise is understood. We are still a long way off research being ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’, to borrow from Abraham Lincoln’s phrase about democratic government that he used in his Gettysburg Address, and there is no consensus that this is a desirable direction of travel, but Lassiter et al’s book informs this debate in a thoughtful and thought-provoking way.
Like the other books I am selecting to take with me to my desert island, it bears re-reading – and that enchanting photograph on the cover is a bonus.
Remaining two choices:
An Isle Called Hirte: A History and Culture of St Kilda to 1930, by Mary Harman (1997) Maclean Press
Crow Country, by Mark Cocker (2007) Jonathan Cape
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